– Israel on a rampage– Can the “two state solution” liberate the Palestinian people?(AWTWNS 19 October 2015)

This AWTWNS news packet for the week of 19 October 2015 contains two articles. They may be reproduced or used in any way, in whole or in part, as long as they are credited.

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Israel on a rampage

Can the “two state solution” liberate the Palestinian people?

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Israel on a rampage

19 October 2015. A World to Win News Service. What’s going on in Israel today is not a case of a peaceful society defending its citizens from attack. It is a Israeli rampage against Palestinians, with collective punishment being imposed on entire neighbourhoods and Palestinians as a people. Israel says it is protecting “its people”, but unarmed Palestinians are being attacked and killed on a far broader scale as official policy by the Israeli state and armed Jewish civilians. If killing children and unarmed adults is wrong, then how can Israeli actions be justified or tolerated?

Palestinian individuals who just happened to be unlucky have been beaten and killed on the street. In addition, Palestinian Web sites and some Western media have reported case after case where soldiers may have placed a knife near the body of someone they have already killed. About half the Palestinian dead so far were not even accused of attacks; most were demonstrating. In some cases, they were hurt or killed simply for “looking” Palestinian. One Jewish man was stabbed by another who mistook him for an “Arab”. A 29-year old Eritrean, similarly “misidentified”, was shot by a soldier and then bludgeoned to death by a mob screaming “Death to Arabs.”

The excuse is the fact that some Palestinians have taken up screwdrivers and kitchen knives against soldiers, police and pseudo-“civilian” settlers armed with automatic weapons, and in some instances attacked Jewish adults and children at random. But Israel’s current murder drive has nothing do do with protecting human lives. Israel kills Palestinian adults and children wantonly, whether they are armed or not.

Whose lives were being protected when an Israeli missile destroyed a home in Gaza 11 October, killing the pregnant Nour Rasmi Hassan and her baby daughter? Israeli authorities claimed they had targeted a nearby Hamas “rocket factory”, but no rockets have been fired from Gaza lately, and Hamas is reported to be enforcing a truce on armed actions against Israel.

Whose lives were being protected when Israeli troops shot across the barrier surrounding Gaza, killing two unarmed boys, 13-year-old Marwan Barbakh and 15-year old Khalil Othman, and wounded seven other people holding a protest 10 October?

Whose life was being protected when an Israeli settler carrying an assault rifle shot and killed 18-year-old Fadel al Qawasmeh? He had just passed through a checkpoint to reach his home in Hebron, a West Bank city whose Palestinian inhabitants are virtually imprisoned in the name of protecting a few illegal Jewish settlers whose avowed aim is to take all Palestinian homes and land. Instead of arresting or even disarming the shooter, the soldiers let settlers distribute candies in celebration.

If Israel is trying to protect lives, why, when an alleged or real assailant is captured and disarmed, are they so often executed on the spot? Why are journalists being targeted and why are people shooting videos of incidents violently repressed, like the French TV cameraman brutally beaten after identifying himself?

Why are Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem and other cities locked down, like a new version of the Warsaw Ghetto for Jews established by the Nazis, with the pretext of protecting lives, while Jewish settler neighbourhoods are allowed to disgorge bands of armed men chanting “Death to Arabs” and looking for victims?

Why can Israeli soldiers, settlers and other Jewish citizens kill Palestinians with impunity, backed up by the combined military force of almost all the Western powers? Why are some people taking up screwdrivers and knives in the face of that?

The current upheaval that began in East Jerusalem and other Palestinian areas in northern Israel, spread to the West Bank and then Gaza did not come out of nowhere. Western authorities and their media like to say that the issue is the Palestinian suspicion that Israel plans to ban Muslims from the Al Aqsa mosque built on the ruins of the equally sacred ancient Jewish Temple Mount. Settler groups backed by government figures have threatened to do just that. Although authoritative rabbis argue that Jews are forbidden to pray there for religious reasons, this wouldn’t be the first time that Zionism adjusted religious tradition for political purposes. But this is not basically a conflict of religions.

Palestinian communities began to come to a boil in the summer of 2014 when Jewish settlers grabbed 16-year-old Mohammad Abu Khdeir, tortured him and burned him alive. They said it was in revenge for the kidnapping and killing of three teenagers from a Jewish settlement on the West Bank shortly before. The two Palestinians accused of killing Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar were later shot dead by Israeli security forces. The homes of their families were destroyed as punishment, even though no one was ever put on trial. Another Palestinian was given a long prison term for complicity. About 35,000 Israeli soldiers and civilians, some posing with their guns, “liked” a Facebook page named “The People of Israel Demand Revenge.”

Of the six men arrested for killing Khdeir, three were released, even though the police said they were suspected of involvement. The other three, who confessed, are in jail awaiting trial. They are expected to plead not guilt by reason of insanity related to their religious convictions. The government has not destroyed their homes, punished their families, etc.

Khdeir’s neighbourhood is one of several in East Jerusalem that have seen mounting protests and fighting against police and settlers. East Jerusalem, once majority Palestinian and also home to Jews who had lived there for a long time, is seeing Palestinian families driven out by new settlers. One neighbourhood, for instance, is almost entirely populated by recent arrivals from the U.S. Palestinian neighbourhoods, both the poorest and better off, are surrounded by walls and fences, literally under siege by soldiers and settlers.

Since Israel annexed all of Jerusalem outright in 1967, Palestinians born there are theoretically Israeli citizens. They have the legal right to travel in Israel, unlike Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, although they are denied, even formally, important rights enjoyed by Jewish Israelis. For many their alleged rights only make the reality of discrimination and violence all the more bitter.

If their houses are on fire, Israeli fire trucks won’t come to the rescue. Their rubbish is their own problem. New schools are out of the question. Every year more Palestinian homes and other structures are torn down for having been built without a permit that’s almost impossible to get. It’s not uncommon for a foreign Jewish man to show up at someone’s door – accompanied by police – with papers declaring him the rightful owner because someone, somehow, is said to have sold the apartment or building to his ancestors.

Now, more than ever, Palestinians of all social classes in Israel and the other occupied territories have to recognize that they can be killed at any time, with impunity, and they can count on their dignity being violated, in addition to the Israeli seizure of most of Palestine itself.

Many of those protesting, fighting police and soldiers and otherwise ready to die rather than accept the situation were not born at the time of the Oslo Accords two decades ago, when Israel agreed to negotiate with the Palestinian leadership. Since then, the status quo has gotten more and more unbearable for Palestinians throughout the land seized by the Zionists in 1947 and 1967. The last decade of relative peace on the West Bank has brought more settlers taking more and more land that they vow they will never give up, more police and army killings to “protect” brazen armed settlers and suppress Palestinian political rights, and more hopelessness. Gaza has been turned into an open-air prison whose inhabitants are perpetually punished without no other justification than Israel’s claim that its security depends on their suffering. Palestinians in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel, supposedly the most privileged, are now among the fiercest fighters.

If Palestinians who are citizens and residents of Israel are treated this way, how could the so-called “two-state solution”, a tiny, fragmented, and toothless Palestinian “state” in Israel’s shadow, be any better?

One reason people grasp at this “solution” is because it’s hard to imagine how Zionism’s oppressive power can be defeated as long as Israel plays an essential role for the U.S. in the Middle East. It is the U.S.’s only thoroughly reliable ally and bully-boy in the region precisely because the Israeli state and privileged Zionist society could not survive without the support of the U.S. and other imperialist powers. This puts Palestinians in a very difficult situation, where fresh strategic thinking is required amid a regional situation that has never been so unstable and unfavourable for the U.S. that has dominated it for decades.

People who want a very different Middle East, and a very different world, and everyone who dares believe that Israeli interests and the Zionist project do not trump Palestinian rights, needs to help expose what is really going on and stand on the side of justice.

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Can the “two state solution” liberate the Palestinian people?

19 October 2015. A World to Win News Service. Following are excerpts from an interview with Ilan Pappe by Khalil Bendib for the Status Audio Journal (www.statushour.com) on 9 September 2015. Pappe is a historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine: A History of Modern Palestine and the Israel-Palestine Question. Driven out of Israel, he is now chair of the Department of History at the University of Exeter in the UK. The full transcript of the lengthy interview is posted on Jadaliyya.com.

The so-called “two-state solution” (a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza existing alongside Israel) is the policy advocated by the U.S. and the Palestinian Authority. Israel has sometimes implied it might accept that, and sometimes, like right now under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declared Israel will never accept it. Many Palestinians and their supporters believe that it is the only possible step forward, while much of the debate has focused on whether or not such a step could actually happen, and if so, how. Pappe discusses why that is a wrong focus, and why, if this concept were implemented, it would represent the legitimation and attempted stabilization of the oppression of the Palestinians as a people.

Ilan Pappe: What lies behind the idea of a two-state solution is: if the Jewish national movement and the Palestinian national movement arrive more or less at the same time to the same place, and were unable to settle the question of to whom the land belongs, and were unable to reconcile, and what was needed was kind of a grown-up in the form of the United States and Britain that would help these two sides to reconcile on the basis of a kind-of American, business-like approach, where you divide the land, you divide the responsibility, and so on. And that is a very wrong way of reading the whole history of Palestine since the arrival of the Zionist movement there in the late nineteenth century until today.

This is not a conflict between two national movements fighting over the same piece of land. This is a struggle between a settler-colonialist movement which arrived in the late nineteenth century in Palestine and still tries today to colonize Palestine by having most of the land with as few of the native people on it as possible. And the struggle of the native people is an anti-colonialist struggle. You have to come back to any historical case studies you remember of an anti-colonialist movement fighting a colonialist power and ask yourself, at any given moment was the idea of partitioning the land between the colonizer and the colonized portrayed as a reasonable solution? Especially by people who were on the left or saw themselves as conscientious members of the society?

And the answer is a resounding no, of course you would not support the division of Algeria between the French settlers and the native Algerians. And even in places where you had settler colonialism, namely where you had white people who had nowhere to go in a way, like in South Africa, if you would suggest today as a progressive person that you should divide South Africa between the white population and the African population, you would be regarded at best as insane, and at worst as someone who is insincere and a fascist. I think the fact that this logic – which is so clear to many people on any other place in the world – somehow fails to work in the case of Palestine.
The two are connected in the sense that when we analyse the situation in Palestine, when we ask ourselves why were Palestinians expelled massively in 1948? Why were the Palestinians in Israel put under military rule between 1948 and 1967? Why was this military rule transferred from inside Israel to the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967? Why are the Bedouins in the south of Israel and the Palestinian villages in the north of Israel today subject, like those who live in Jerusalem, to a policy of expropriation of land and strict regulation in their own places of habitation? Then of course we get to this question of why does Israel refuse to allow the refugees to return and imposes such an inhumane siege on Gaza? When we ask all of these questions and we look for the reason why they are done, we know now better than we ever knew before that the reason for this is ideological. It is a Zionist ideology.

This is a Zionist vision shared by all the Zionist parties. Now, this is the main, almost the exclusive, obstacle to peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. Not addressing it, but only addressing the Israeli policy here or there, would be similar to addressing certain policies of South Africa during the heyday of Apartheid without touching Apartheid at all.

Khalil Bendib: In your book, On Palestine, co-authored with Noam Chomsky, you speak of this term, “peace orthodoxy”, which you accuse of being more of a racist than pragmatic tendency. You go as far as saying that among the pushers of a two-state solution, “the dictionary of the peace orthodoxy sprang out of an almost religious belief in the two-state solution. And that comes straight out of a contemporary version of Orwell’s 1984.”

IP: Yeah. It is a newspeak. I mean, I am using Orwell here in his reference to newspeak, the kind of language that does not only disable us from calling a spade a spade, it called it exactly the opposite. Usually, a cruel reality is described as a benevolent one in the newspeak of Orwell. And I think the same is true about these words, which to me are sacred. I mean, “peace,” “justice”, “reconciliation” are three of the most sacred words in our vocabulary as human beings. They really represent the highest form of human ambition to live peacefully with one another, to live in a society which is much better than any other society. Now, to use these languages in order to cover up for a process on the ground which achieves exactly the opposite – instead of reconciliation, it sows more dissent and animosity and hatred; instead of peace, it creates war; and instead of justice, it maintains an Apartheid system – when these words are used as a protective shield to describe a reality that is exactly the opposite of what they mean, this for me is even worse than racism in a way. This is a kind of the Orwellian nightmare that I have when people begin to use words in such a way.

The idea for a two-state solution began as a Zionist, Israeli ploy after 1967 to reconcile a really simple problem: they have kicked millions of Palestinians in 1948, but because of their territorial appetite, they wanted to take those parts of Palestine they did not occupy in 1948 – the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – but with the territory came another one million and a half Palestinians, today almost three million Palestinians. In order to reconcile the fact that you now have the whole of the land, but you are still left with a demographic nightmare as far as the Zionist movement was concerned, one of the means they have used was the peace process. The peace process was used as a kind of message to the world which says, “As you can see, we are now robbing the Palestinians in the occupied territories of any basic human rights and civil rights. As you can see, we are expropriating their land, we are building Jewish settlements on them, we are expelling them quite massively, and we imprison them even if they dare just to raise the Palestinian flag.” Now, what the peace process means for the Israelis is a message to the world: “This is all temporary, of course when peace comes, all these measures will be removed.”

Now, of course, you can understand why people on the Western left would have succumbed to this explanation after five years of occupation, or ten years of occupation. I can still see why one could still be hopeful that the Israelis mean it, or that the world has the power to force Israel to mean it. But after almost fifty years, to still stick to this idea which is an Israeli ploy to deepen the colonization of the areas they have occupied in 1967, and to wipe out any possibility of negotiating the areas they occupied in 1948, or the return of the refugees, to do that is really to be very stagnant and dogmatic in one’s perception of the reality. You would have expected critical voices on the American and European left to be a bit more alert to the kind of trap they have found themselves in, which Israel very cleverly has put there, in a way.

From a scholarly point of view, there are many aspects of the reality in South Africa which are different from those in Palestine. I could mention the lack of any equivalent to the Jewish lobby in the case of South Africa. I can mention also the Holocaust as a game changer in the history of Palestine, and there is nothing equivalent to this in the case of South Africa. And of course there are differences in the way the Apartheid regime manifested itself in South Africa and in the way the ethnic cleansing paradigm, or structure, in Israel was working. But these are minute issues that do not really undermine the basic comparison, which is the most important one.

KB: Again, in opposition to the more “pragmatic” Chomsky, you place not only the right of return for Palestinians at the heart of an eventual solution to the Palestinian question, but also reparations for what happened to the Palestinians over the past sixty-plus years. Explain to us how this is not necessarily just a utopian dream, and how these two essential conditions are central to a true solution for the future of Palestine-Israel.

IP: Yes, indeed. I think my departure point on the right of return is very different from those who would assess it pragmatically. Namely, is it feasible, or even on the question – which, anyway, is debatable – does Israel have the capacity to absorb such a large number of people should all the refugees want to come back. I think this is not now the issue and that is not the reason we are now bringing it up. We all have been bringing up the issue of right of return. The [denial of] the right of return is a symptom of the racist nature of the Zionist regime in Israel. That is the main problem.

The objection of Israel to the right of return stems from the same ideological reasoning that lies behind the Judaization policy in Galilee, the destruction of Bedouin villages in the Naqab in the south of Israel, the Bantustanization of the West Bank, and the ghettoization of Gaza. It stems from the same reason, and as a Zionist you always wanted it from the late nineteenth century to today, you want to have as much of the land as possible with as few people as possible. And therefore, when you support the right of return, you are not only recognizing an individual right that the international community sanctions in Resolution 194 from the 11th of December, 1948. You not only adhere to all the international conventions about the refugees’ right of return. No less important, you refuse to accept as legal, as moral, and as politically acceptable, the idea that the native people have no right to be in their own homeland. And I think that is the main issue.

Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.